Emmett Till

Going back to the discussion we had on Tuesday, we saw a part of A Birth of Nation, where an African American character chases after a Caucasian woman, in attempt to rape her. She then jumps off a cliff, and the African American gets lynched. This reminded me of a program I once saw on TV about the case of Emmett Till. I don't know if anyone has ever heard of him, but he was a 14 year old African American boy who was murdered in Mississippi in 1955. As the story goes, he was leaving a shop one day with his friends, when he either whistled, or (depending on which story you read), said "bye, baby" to the young white woman who ran the shop. Hearing this now seems like nothing, right? However, back then this was a huge deal, and it cost Emmett his life. The white woman, Carolyn Bryant, told her husband about the event, and he was determined to find this boy. He asked around until he figured out that it was Emmett who did this. Then, Carolyn's husband and another man abducted him from his home in the middle of the night. They tortured him and threw his body in a river with a 70 lb. fan attached to him to keep the body down. Emmett's body was found though by two boys. The body was badly deformed, and you could tell that Emmett was beaten, shot, and had one of his eyes removed from its socket. Emmett's mother received his body, and was mortified. She had a funeral with an open casket, so everyone could see what had happened to him. If you look up Emmet Till, you can see a picture of his disfigured body in the casket, and it is absolutely disgusting. Those who murdered Emmett Till were put on trial for it, but ended up getting off free of all charges. Although there was definite evidence, at the time, a murder of a young black boy was just not a big deal.

It's important to see how African Americans were portrayed in films, because it's very clear that is how they were seen in real life too. They were powerless, inferior, and dehumanized by whites, We may not be a racist free society now, but when you see that the case of Emmett happened only 56 years ago, I think our society has made a lot of progress in a short amount of time.